optionshouse

Category: Brokers

At OptionsHouse, our mission is to provide savvy investors in options and stock the power and functionality of traditional software-based trading tools with the portability of an online trading platform.

Review Updated

So I decided to shop around for a better (i.e. Lower) per transaction cost broker on behalf of my corporation, and in looking around I came across options house. There are mixed reviews out there, as expected, but the experience I had with them definitely rings true with a lot of reviews I read.

Without going into details of how it went down, my application for a corporate account took about 6 weeks (!). Calling customer support to find out info on my account was like playing Russian roulette - one person would tell me one thing, and when I called the second time to speak with another person, I would get different information. Oh and by the way, some of their reps were really cordial, but there are reps there that are rude. At some point, I received a welcome email stating my user name and temp password, but when I went to set my account, I had no access to my account. After numerous calls and online chats, where no one could figure out why I could not acces my account (some reps said that my account did not exist), their person in accounts sent an email to me stating that I was still missing a document (which was some info card, which looked like the same info I send them previously).

Funding was another story. Although short, I ended up loosing out on wire fees($30 going out $30 coming in).

Im glad I did not get to find out what their other issues are, and hopefully this pattern of reviews will either serve as a warning to others, or the management of the optionshouse will use it to make improvements in their processeses, as I believe they are loosing out on business.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

I have used them throughout 2015 and was making a lot of money trading credit spreads from Taking Profits I did not want to break the string or change my luck so I stayed with TM although I know there are houses with less commissions, but when you're making $300k I dare not change a thing.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

- There are no artificial, firm created, minimums for doing things like selling puts. If you have the cash or margin available, you may sell a put. This common sense attitude prevails for everything they do. Many, many other firms will let you short a stock, but not sell a put, even if you have the cash to cover the strike price sold.

- In times of market duress, such as during the selloff/correction this last August, the firm (or the clearing firm) requires additional margin, up to 100% in some cases. Be aware if you commonly carry a margin balance, to plan for this type of thing to happen once in awhile. Not all stock symbols were affected this last time, but only things that made sense such as leveraged 3x ETFs.

The trading screen is the primary view when you log-in, and other stuff branches from this screen. It will take a while to know where to find everything not directly needed for trading. Handy is just about anything actually wanted in order to trade. Options have their own tab found on the main trade screen.

If you want some help with account information, give them a call. Telephone support is good. Do not expect a timely answer when using email.

For research, you won't like anything they have. Well, I've never really liked the research available at any broker. This firm makes little pretense in the research area. However, the site does track all kinds of market activity that may be useful when looking for a trade, and also has cool options screeners an so forth. While OH reviews rightly say the research stuff is minimal, they never include the good stuff available. Again, if it's trade related, there is something here for you. For ordinary research, go somewhere else such as Seeking Alpha, NASDAQ, Yahoo finance, etc (which I'm willing to bet, is where you go for research anyway).

Good luck, and many happy trades to you.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

Brokers get a lot of s*** from novices all the time. I used to be one of them, constantly badgering the customer service (which I'll admit is sub-par). However after being with them for 3 years, seeing days when advertised commissions were still 3.95, all the way to the TradeMonster merger, I can say I have a pretty good grasp on their holistic service.

The pros:

- Very cheap rates

- No account minimum

- Gorgeous web and mobile platform

- Great analytics since Trademonster merger

- Easy to navigate

- Incredible tools for option traders

The cons:

- Took out Time-contingencies with Merger (e.g. have stop activate at 10 am vs. all day; almost made me leave them)

- Customer Service (Over the years I have had some issues, a number of them were on their end. After three years when you say you are considering other options because they messed up, you'd expect they throw you some free trades... never expect anything) Customer service is no help, so try to trade well enough so you don't need them.

- Execution speed. They managed to add another window to the buying and selling process with the merger lol. Now when you want to buy an option, you click through three windows, change some numbers etc... if you are day trading s*** just takes way too long.

- Stops. When I am not looking they seem to work, but I guess very delayed. Just yesterday I had the brokerage open on one screen, saw the stock dipped below stop. Nothing happened. I gave it a few more moments. Nothing. Before it dropped any lower I canceled the useless 'stop' and sold it manually. Definitely took some confidence as to going un-plugged and letting contingency orders handle it, because clearly they can't.

Overall I would recommend them. Been with them for a while and like it. Will you trip up here or there? perhaps, but that's with all brokers.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

OptionsHouse manipulated the purchase price of my options so that they made approximately another 10% profit on my purchase between the bid and the spread in a relatively illiquid market for that particular strike price and date.

Secondarily, OptionsHouse took the other side of the trade today and started SELLING puts into my strike price which resulted in further depressing the value of the puts I purchased yesterday.

While these actions may not be illegal, they are unethical. Optionshouse is effectively "betting" against their own customers interests in the options markets.

The value of my options dropped roughly 15% from purchase price on two days when the combined drop in the price of Apple stock was approximately 3% and when the value of 95% of all other options in the same time period increased approximately 10-12%.

If anyone has had similar experiences with OptionsHouse please feel free to send me a private message at waxxarrific@gmailc.com

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

The tools that OptionsHouse has for research make it hard to use their platform as a single broker. They offer no real research tools, just simple graphs, and fundamental data.

Their execution time, and pricing makes them much better than most brokers. I will continue to use OptionsHouse, but I will also keep an account with another broker that gives me better research tools.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

I have had a handful of issues with options house over the past year. At first i loved it when i was only continually buying long term positions. Once it came time to start selling and trading regularly the problems were extremely costly. To begin with their site crashes almost constantly. And of course, its notorious for crashing on fridays (of course, options expiration time). Last yeah OH cost me $15K because their site froze for the entire day and options that i owned and had planed to sell immediately in the morning on a pop, ended up expiring as junk. The trade would have netted a profit and i ended with a loss.Then the margin calls came, i continually was called on large margin calls even when I had well over $100K in cash in my account. Every time i would call their margin department i would get nowhere. waste of time. Like others I also started to find money missing in my account, $2,000 here, $3,000 there, occasionally $25,000+. Most of the time the money some house found its way back to my account. But now im in a huge audit to see if anything it missing. Today was the last straw for me. I created a large straddle on TSLA at the $205 strike with $3 put and $3 calls. The stock opened at $203 and quickly fell to $198 area, perfet, i nearly tripled one position and could hold the other for free or take the prermium. The first 45 minutes of trading i continued to get an error "this strike cannot be found" (i was clicking on my position to sell it). By the time i was able to sell the position, TSLA was back up to $204 and both positions lost significant premiums due to expiration that day. Cost me $10K in losses and $8K in profits. Im sure if i would add up all the missed trades due to their flaky site and app, i would have well over $50K. Im moving $1 million in various accounts assets to another broker. Im tired of these clowns!

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

Optionshouse used to be great for ultra cheap rates. Their new rates aren’t that cheap and their margin department is awful. For example, I bought a stock on margin and two days later they issued a margin call despite the fact that the stock was up from where I bought it. I was at greater than 50% equity but still got a margin call. It turns out they changed the margin requirement to 100% on that stock. I called the margin department and they did not help me any. I feel like they moved the goal post on me for allowing me to buy on margin one day and then two days later changing the margin requirements to 100%. This makes no sense and is bad for traders. Since they elevated their rates, the inconvenience of their margin department policies are not worth the hassle. I would rather pay a few more dollars per commission and work with a decent common sense margin department. I am closing my account and moving to another brokerage. Also, their after hours trading is horrible. They only allow after hours trades for on hour instead of the whole after hours session. Avoid the hassle of Optionshouse.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC